For some time now Local ADSL accounts with or without a modem have been available. What "local only" means is that you have no international bandwidth and can only reach sites and servers located in South Africa. Since local bandwidth is about 10 times cheaper than international bandwidth the accounts are much cheaper too.

What to use Local ADSL accounts for or how it can save you money?

The lack of international banwidth makes Local Only ADSL pretty useless for general web surfing and file downloads but there is plenty of bandwidth intensive tasks that can be done on local only accounts rather than on your taditioanal ADSL accounts. What smart people do is move some of the more bandwidth itensive stuff that does not require international bandwidth to work onto a local ADSL only account freeing up more of the expensive international bandwidth. So what are the tasks that can be offloaded to a Local Only Account?

• Local ADSL is a great option for VOIP solutions. If you are using a VOIP provider will have a local server in South Africa. In most cases VOIP will need a dedicated ADSL line to provide decent quality for 3-4 simulatenous calls. Any break out to international servers will occurr from your VOIP providers servers so they are the ones that need International bandwidht not you. Alternatively you may have your own internal VOIP server to connect remote branches located around South Africa. Once again there is no need for international bandwidth.
• Local ADSL is great for VPNS once again here you are interested in connecting remote offices to each other. As long as the offices are all located in South Africa there is no need for International bandwidth. This is not a solution if you MD needs to connect from overseas but then you can make use your international account for those cases and same some money by offloading the local usage onto a cheaper trunk.
• Local Only ADSL is great for hosting your own mail server. Many small companies are now hosting their own mail servers. In some cases use is being made of ADSL accounts with fixed IPs but you can also host your own mail server on dynamic IPs using dynamic IP services such as dyndns.org or by relaying mail through your ISP. Even is you are only popping mail froma hosted solution like Exchange it is better to offload this traffic onto cheaper Local Only ADSL accounts. You won't believe how much bandwidth email can take up!
• Local ADSL is good for Gaming - Gaming is a big past time for many people. As South Africa's internet usage grows many services previously only available overseas have been launched in South Africa. There are now several games servers in SA. Gaming can take a lot of bandwidth so if you are a home user and addicted to gaming consider using a local only ADSL account.
• Local ADSL is great for Peer-to-Peer networking and local mirrors - Not only is p-2-p networking great for Local only ADSL there are also many servers now being mirrored in South Africa. If you are a Linux or Open Source junkie many ISOs can now be found locally. Offload all of your file sharing and large downloads to local only ADSL accounts were possible.

So if you are a heavy internet user maybe its time to consider making use of a Local Only ADSL account  with a modem or without for business or pleasure